Be Excellent To Each Other

Someone is selling a raspberry pi at work but.. They don't know which model it is.

How can I tell?

Any codes printed on the board?

I can't tell... Those are the best pictures I've got of it.

Ask the seller?

I think it's one of the early ones, pretty sure the current ones have more pins than that on the GPIO header.

Raspberry Pi 1 model B based on the diagrams on Wikipedia.

Cool.. Thanks. I know nothing about them but would like to put one inside an old NES. She wants £30 for this, a case, keyboard, mouse and book about it all.

I might offer £25 and see how I get on.

A brand new Pi2 only costs £30. That's just the bare board though, no media or cables or whatever, but honestly the 2 is significantly more powerful the older ones.

So what is the fuss with raspberry pi? Is it basically a really cheap underpowered computer and you provide your own monitor and peripherals, or is the joy that you solder all the parts on yourself or something?

There a a few fun things you can do with it. Mine runs raspian, which is an optimised version of Debian and so it's basically Linux with X for the GUI. It's very low power, and can be used with a network cable or wireless dongle for easy internet access.

A lot of people do stuff like make cheap home security cameras that are obviously way cheaper and much more customisable than shit you'd otherwise buy. I've used mine as a media server (XBian) which can pull stuff off the network or a USB drive to stream stuff on a TV with HDMI. A chuffload of other stuff I'm not imaginative to think of myself, but it's highly portable and a lot of people can run them for hours remotely on nothing more than a battery block.

I've also got a version that as the AWS cli on it, meaning I can use an incredibly tiny computer to fire up giant clusters in the cloud, which in itself is kind of fun.

Four faster processor cores instead of one, and double the RAM at 1GB. Having four USB ports is handy, too.

I was really surprised at how snappy it feels!

I use mine as a media player box using Kodi, but I understand that the Pi 2 is fast enough to easily run Playstation 1 emulators at full speed.

Needs more LEDs.

If anyone is actually interested in a Pi 2, there's an offer on a starterpack, which I'm contemplating:

TNW offer

Or just get this for £50: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vilros-Raspberr ... 00T53135O/

That's got everything you need to get rolling. That deal posted by Fop isn't great, and ignore that bollocks about those guides being worth $199, ha! There's so, so much free documentation available online from enthusiasts you'd never need to pay for it.

Wot HeebieBJs said. That looks a much better offer. Luckily I'm skint so I didn't go further than contemplating the one I posted.